Broadway attendance during an average week in February of 1963 was only 20 percent better than it had been in 1933. Yet over the same period, spending on the performing arts more than tripled, ticket sales for spectator sports more than doubled, and real per capita GNP advanced 160 percent. The purpose of this paper is to determine why the demand for seats to the most professional, most polished, and most popular legitimate theatre in the should have grown so slowly. In the process, elasticity estimates of the relationship between income-quantity, income-quality, price quantity and cash costs-quantity are derived. From these figures, computed from cross-sectional data and from time-series data, a reasonably clear understanding of the theatre's problems emerges.

The cross-sectional data were developed in April of 1962 by means of a survey of theatregoers conducted by the author. Questionnaires were inserted in all Playbills distributed in seven Broadway houses. A total of 18 performances were involved. The form requested only one member of a family to answer. Those replying were asked to drop the completed copy in one of several large boxes in the lobby and near the exits.

Twenty-six percent of the evening audience was represented by the returns; only 16 percent of the two matinees surveyed responded. In a trial run the respondents were given business reply envelopes and asked to mail back the questionnaires. There were no significant differences in any way relevant to this paper between the responses of the audience from the mail survey and from those collected within the theatre. The results of this survey were compared to the figures from the annual Playbill survey of the theatregoers and to an earlier study of audiences conducted by Weiss and Geller Research of Chicago, the differences were small. (p. 227-242)

CONTENTS
Time-series results.
The data.
Testing the model.
Conclusion.